Penguin Pool Murder (1932)

Very best movie i ever watch

Highly Overrated But Still Good

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Beautiful, moving film.

Penguin Pool Murder from 1932 stars Edna May Oliver, James Gleason, Mae Clarke, and Donald Cook. It's a B movie, the first of the Hildegarde Withers series.While Miss Withers is with her students at the aquarium, the body of a stockbroker, Gerald Parker, is found in the penguin tank.His wife Gwen (Clarke) is suspected, as she had a boyfriend (Cook) there at the time.The inspector on the case, Piper (Gleason) has to put up with a witness -- Miss Withers, who else -- who has all kinds of opinions and advice. He soon comes to appreciate her keen sense of observation.Short and lively, this is entertaining, with Oliver and Gleason giving vivid characterizations. I am looking forward to seeing more in this series.

***SPOILERS*** Excellent detective movie involving spinster teacher Hilderard Martha Winters, Edna May Oliver, solving a murder mystery that New York's police top detective Oscar Piper, James Gleason, couldn't even get a handle on.It's when stockbroker Gerald Parker, Guy Usher, is found dead after being dumped in the Battery Park Aquarium's penguin pool that it's the late Gerald Parker's wife's Gwen's, Mea Cark, former boyfriend Philip Seymour, Donald Cook, who's suspected in his murder. Gwen planning to leave Gerald after he slapped her was to secretly meet Seymour at the aquarium to restart their love affair until Gerald, who followed her there, unexpectedly showed up! In a scuffle Seymour knocked Gerald cold and the last thing you know he's in the penguin pool as dead as a doornail!With top cop Oscar Piper showing up at the scene of the crime he doesn't have any trouble getting a confession out of Seymour in Gerald's murder. As it turned out teacher Hildegarde Winters was taking her students on a field trip to the aquarium and being as observant as she is saw things differently. Catching a pickpocket Chicago Lew, James Hermond, in the act with her umbrella Hildegarde also was framed by the killer by using her hat-pin that he stole, during all the confusion, to do poor Mr. Parker in! That's after both Gwen & Seymour left him laying unconscious on the stairs above the penguin pool!It's Hildegard's common sense and brilliant detective work that in the end uncover Gerald Parker's murderer who's own arrogance and hubris ended up doing him in! Something that Hildegard noticed about Gerald's killer that top NY city police department cop Oscar Piper had no clue about was that he in fact had a good reason for doing Gerald in: love & money. The most despicable thing that Gerald Parker's killer did was beside trying to implicate Hildergarde in his crime in make up a cock & bull story in that she was in fact his,Gerald Parker's, secret lover back in her home town in Iowa who took revenge on him, by murdering Gerald, for leaving her.***SPOILERS***Of course the witty and on the ball Hilderguard expected this line of questioning from that low down rat and was more then ready for him with a big surprise of her own. The surprise that the killer unknowingly himself supplied for her by proving that he, not Hildegarde Seymour or Gwen, in fact murdered Mr.Parker! That in a trap that both Hildegarde and Piper set for him that he fell lock stock and barrel for!

"I'm a schoolteacher and I might have done wonders for you if I'd caught you early enough!!!" so starts the witty repartee between Hildegarde Withers and Inspector Piper, and a great movie partner- ship was born.This was the first film in a far too short series. Stuart Palmer created the character of Hildegarde Withers (Edna May Oliver) and the very exasperated Police Inspector Piper (James Gleason). With Oliver's barbed wit and dry one liners and the fact that Gleeson knows he can't solve the case without her, it is a match made in heaven. Oliver made 3 Hildegarde Withers films - "The Penguin Pool Murder", "Murder on a Blackboard" (1934) and "Murder on a Honeymoon" (1935). After that Helen Broderick took over. She was a great character actress ("Top Hat", "Swing Time") and managed to keep the standard set by Oliver high. However when Zasu Pitts took over it was hard to imagine her as a rational and witty schoolteacher, who would never miss a clue. Even the title "40 Naughty Girls" shows how low the series had sunk."hmmm, a pickpocket ", "the man's a born detective!!!"Gwen (Mae Clarke) is having a fling with Phillip Seymour (Donald Cook). She is married to stuffy Gerald Parker, the director of the Aquarium, but is planning to divorce him. When he surprises them in a secret meeting, Phillip punches him and he falls down the stairs. He later turns up dead at the bottom of the penguin pool.Piper gathers the suspects together. Hemingway (Clarence Wilson) who has just been sacked because he has been playing the stock market with Aquarium funds, lawyer Barry Costello (Robert Armstrong), Seymour because he has confessed and Gwen because she is acting suspiciously. Rochelle Hudson makes an appearance as a sassy receptionist. Both Gwen and Phillip are arrested hoping to bring the real murderer out of hiding. Costello, who secretly loves Gwen provides enough evidence to prove that only a man could have killed Parker thus exonerating Gwen. You will not believe the ending (it is really good!!!)"It takes a certain type to be a detective - yes I've noticed that!!!"Recommended.

With the coming of sound to the movies and "the Crash" to the stock market, musicals, screwball comedies and tightly plotted "cozy" mysteries became staples of 30's film going and frequently a valuable, if unintentional, tour of the decade's culture (one of the potential motives of one of the suspects in THE PENGUIN POOL MURDERS is a "margin call" on a brokerage account about to be wiped out by falling stock prices!).In 1932, a year after Dashiel Hammett had introduced the "hard boiled" detective to novels and films with his Sam Spade in THE MALTESE FALCON (a decade before the Oscar winning remake we all know today!), while Philo Vance was still at his peak, Charlie Chan had just started his marathon run, and two years before Dashiel Hammett would backtrack to seemingly invent the "comedy mystery" in the first of the THIN MAN series, Stuart Palmer's "Hildegarde Withers" stories were pointing the way to that perfect bantering comedy.Miss Withers was one of the first screen characters to build on "the little old lady" detectives first introduced by Mary Roberts Rinehart and later to be highly polished - though with fewer comic overtones - in Agatha Christie's Miss Marple tales.Beautifully acerbic character actress Edna May Oliver first assayed the plum role of Withers in THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER, playing every stereotype of the prim, corseted but observant, spinster school teacher for all they were worth against the background of a solidly plotted mystery and a grand supporting cast headed by perennial mystery fixture James Gleason as the much put-upon Inspector Piper. A New York City now long vanished became an active part of the supporting cast.While Miss Oliver chose not to be pinned down to the continuing Withers role after only three films (THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER - '32, MURDER AT THE BLACKBOARD - '34 and MURDER ON A HONEYMOON - '35), passing on the part to solid comedienne Helen Broderick for the less well written but enjoyable and frequently aired MURDER ON THE BRIDAL PATH - '36 and (with less effect) fine supporting comedienne Zasu Pitts for a final two (THE PLOT THICKENS - '36, and FORTY NAUGHTY GIRLS - '37), all the Withers' films are fun - but the Olivers are the best of the bunch.Connoisseurs of period mystery should especially treasure THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER for its location shots of some now vanished (or at least radically transformed) Manhattan landmarks - most notably the then New York City Aquarium (long before the institution decamped to Brooklyn). The building at Battery Park, at the tip of Manhattan, has since lost its roof and interior to be returned to its original (now landmarked) form as the actual battery (a fort - "Castle Clinton") which protected New York Harbor in the early 1800's. Before becoming the Aquarium shown in the 1932 film it was already a famous roofed building: converted in 1823 to the "Castle Garden" theatre where in the 1850's Jenny Lind, "the Swedish Nightingale," made her American debut and Lola Montes danced! From 1855 to 1890, it was the United States' immigration depot before Ellis Island was built, and as such, the first ground in America millions of immigrants set foot on. Then, for years it was the New York City Aquarium where Manhattanites could see examples of aquatic life (and the occasional movie corpse). The Aquarium would not pass muster today for the cramped, indeed life threatening, conditions its inmates were forced to endure - but that in itself is part of the realistic picture of life in the 30's seemingly minor films like these can offer. While the Aquarium interiors were studio recreations, these had to be believable pictures of the world the audiences they were issued to lived in, and we can learn a lot from them about that world as a result. We have come a long way . . . in some ways.Today, New York's Battery Park grows out from and around the building which beautifully starts of THE PENGUIN POOL MURDERS. The Park contains - directly in front of the former Aquarium - the most eloquent and complete memorial the tragedy of 9/11/01 could possibly have: the "fractured globe" which originally sat in the Plaza between the Twin Towers - now with an "eternal flame" at its base. If you're going to be in New York, don't miss this increasingly meaningful piece of sculpture - but first see its setting as it looked 70 years earlier in delightful PENGUIN POOL MURDERS!